Interview with Stephen Chiodo, director of ‘Alien Xmas’
Today sees the release of Netflix‘s new stop-motion holiday special Alien Xmas, directed by industry veteran Stephen Chiodo and based on his children’s book Chiodo Bros.’ Alien Xmas. The film tells the story of the diminutive but big-hearted alien X, who discovers that “in a world full of stuff, things aren’t meant to be taken, but given” when his alien race, the Klepts, attempts to steal the Earth’s gravity.
A long-established special effects director whose earlier stop-motion projects go back to Tim Burton’s 1982 animated short Vincent as well as the 1980 feature film I Go Pogo, Chiodo is also known for directing the live-action 1988 cult classic Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Alongside teaching stop-motion animation at the California Institute of the Arts, as president and creative director of Chiodo Bros. Productions Inc. his notable work has included the legendary ‘Large Marge’ sequence from Tim Burton’s 1985 feature Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, the stop motion character animation for the 2003 feature film Elf, creating marionettes for Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s Team America: World Police as well as several segments for The Simpsons and pilots for CNN, ShowTime, Relativity Media and the Disney Channel.
You’ve been active for a long time and worked on some pretty incredible projects alongside your brothers. Do most things you work on tend to be under the umbrella of Chiodo Bros. or do you guys go off and do separate things as well?
Well yeah, usually it’s under the umbrella of Chiodo Bros. Productions, but we do kind of branch out because of our own individual talents into other endeavors. Then eventually, it comes back to our production company. For example, in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, the ‘Large Marge’ animation I did. I knew Tim (Burton) and Rick (Heinrichs) from Vincent and other productions, so they hired me to do that effect, but I brought it to our company so my brothers kind of helped me with building Large Marge. So we worked together as a subcontractor for Tim and Rick on that. So it’s all one big meld of creative people working together.
You bring up a small, affectionate bone to pick I had written down in my notes here, that for all of the three seconds of Large Marge’s screen time it’s a moment in the film many people my age remember being traumatised by!
It’s funny, I can remember when I was approached by Rick who had these two shots, the Tyrannosaurus Rex that had Pee-Wee’s bicycle and then this ‘Large Marge’ effect. I wanted to do the dinosaur because I’ve always been interested in animating dinosaurs, and he said “No, no, I’m going to do that one”. So I got Large Marge and nobody really knew how we were going to do it but we took the challenge, worked our way through and created a pretty funny effect. I was really happy, it seemed to be like a highlight of the movie, one of the things that people remember most from the film. It was really a fun thing to do and be a part of.
And you worked on Tim Burton’s Vincent also?
Yeah, I worked on Vincent, the animated short about the boy who thinks he’s Vincent Price – I was a technical director and the animator on that. Then he did another show for Disney, a Hansel and Gretel with Asian actors, and I was again technical director and animator on that as well. But then when he got to do Beetlejuice I was working on Killer Klowns. So we went on different paths but yeah, I loved working with him. Vincent was one of the nicest projects I’ve worked on in my entire career. It’s a beautiful story, wonderfully designed. Really wonderful little short.
Another project that’s quite dear to my heart that you just mentioned there – Killer Klowns from Outer Space, which has become quite beloved.
Yeah, I’m amazed! I mean, my brothers and I, we tried to make a film that we just loved, with all the sci fi influences, and Warner Brothers and Looney Tunes, all that stuff we loved as kids, we wanted to put in a movie. And after all these years, like 30 plus years now, I’m just floored at how many people like that movie and still enjoy it today. It’s a big surprise to me. When I look back at the network of people that got us to make it, it’s kind of extraordinary. I mean, my brothers and I were doing the special props for Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre back in the 80s, one of the producers was Fred Fuchs who came up to us one day and said he knew some people who were looking for low-budget films to go to the direct-to-video market.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6Nd26hd4o4
So we pitched Killer Clowns from Outer Space as an idea to Trans World Entertainment and we sold it in the room. We said “Wow, this is really easy!”. Well, 30 years later, we haven’t sold another feature film! I’m not complaining, it was the right time at the right place with the right people. Quite frankly, I don’t think they knew what they were getting into. I think they thought we were going to create a film with a bunch of guys and white pancake makeup killing people with knives or chainsaws, they had no idea. They just left us alone in Santa Cruz to make this sci fi comedy. So it was really kind of a fluke, the people you work with in the industry and the opportunities that pop up.
So there’s been a lot of stuff between then and now. A lot of it quite high profile including work you’ve done for The Simpsons…
Yeah, in the past whenever there was a stop motion parody it was something that would come to us. Eventually it led to us doing a couch gag which was a real honor for us. We love the show and it was a great show piece. But they did a California Raisins parody, a Davey and Goliath parody – so whenever they went to that technique, we were like the go-to guys to produce it as a priority. There was the Aardman parody too that went in, that episode won an Emmy.
That one definitely made an impact over here, the Wallace and Gromit tribute segment.
It was great. And I think even Nick Park kind of congratulated us on that which was a real compliment. It was really funny that the Simpsons characters and Aardman characters are similar in a very weird way. I think that worked out pretty well. Creature Comforts I think was one of my first introductions to their work and I’ve been a big fan ever since. It’s not just the visual style, but the sense of humor. They aren’t just funny, they’re clever. And the characters are so right-on that you just love them.
From what I understand, Alien Xmas was based on a book you wrote, is that right?
Yeah, the story had kind of a weird history. My brothers and I had always been fans of the Rankin/Bass holiday specials, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer we watched as children and was always synonymous with Christmas for us. We were working with Disney at one point on these stop-motion Christmas interstitials, and the executive told us they were looking for holiday specials. So given that as a challenge, I thought of Alien Xmas. It hearkens back to Killer Clowns, I wanted to do something unique, a mash-up, so I figured I’d take the classic family heartwarming Christmas tale and put sci-fi in there. So we came up with this pitch and went around town trying to sell it but a special was not the kind of thing people were buying at that time. As we had all these assets in the stories we said “Let’s create a book, let’s keep the story and create something that we can go out there and pitch and sell as its own property”. That’s where the book came from, really, was as a sales tool for our special. So once we got that we started hitting the road again. We partnered with Jon Favreau – we had done the stop motion effects for his movie Elf and he’s a real fan of stop-motion. So we pitch it to Jon, he liked it and he helped us sell it to Netflix.
Is the book that you developed something that you have put out as a book in its own right, or did it mainly exist as a kind of pitch tool?
Oh, no, it was a book in its own right. We knew we were serious about it. When we couldn’t sell a special we wanted to do the book, so we contacted Bob Self – who has a publishing company called Baby Tattoo with a whole stable of artists – and he agreed to publish our book. Maybe it ended up being a sales tool to help give us bankability. I think that was an extra step that helped us, but I think Jon just loved the idea, he thought it was intriguing. There was an interesting spin on a classic Scrooge type redemption tale, very reminiscent of the Grinch, but told in a unique, new manner. We would always see Jon at horror conventions, he’d always show up and ask what was going on with Alien Xmas, but the time was right just after The Lion King. We contacted him and he said “Hey guys, you know what, let’s not go feature film. Streaming is the way to go”. And, like many times during our collaboration, he was right – it was really a stronger way for us to go.
When it came to Netflix and their involvement, did they come on at the end when it was done or did they have a role in the production itself?
They were partners from the start. We worked with Katie Mullins at Netflix, and they shepherded us through some of their considerations and concerns. They were just delightful to work with. We had a little spars here and there about things that we were passionate about, suggestions that they made that we didn’t take to in the beginning. But, through conversation, we saw the reasons for doing things. It was a really wonderful experience. Netflix is an international company so they researched all the different countries’ expectations for holiday specials and talked to a cultural consultant to bring some more diversity to the show. If we hadn’t done this diversity mix, it would look like it was done in the 60s. So the collaboration with Netflix was, I think, a very powerful element.
Alien Xmas (©2020 Netflix)
While there is that modernisation element to it, in a lot of respects it also feels quite familiar. It seems to evoke an established vibe of holiday specials from back in the day, especially American specials. Was that the idea, to capture that sort of retro vibe?
Oh, absolutely. That was it exactly. At least here in the States, stop-motion is synonymous with Christmas. There have been so many specials in the past and so many commercials that have come out using that technique around the holidays, so we wanted to hearken back to the design style and technique used in those. But you know, if you revisit those specials, the animation is kind of janky. I didn’t think faithful reproduction of that would have been the smart thing to do, so we upgraded the production values, giving it more of a contemporary feel. But at its core is a simple story about the spirit of giving. Hopefully that comes through.
What’s on the horizon for you guys after this? Are plans to do anything more with X?
Yeah, we were thinking Alien Halloween would be a fun adventure for X to kind of conquer his fears, so there are ideas we do have. We’ll see how successful the special is, I think if it gets whatever numbers or analytics Netflix collects then hopefully we can get something like that going. But for Chiodo brothers, we have just a lifetime of ideas we want to get on the screen, and stop-motion seems to be in vogue. Now, it’s a cycle, who knows if it’ll last, but I do think it’s been accepted as a valid storytelling technique that’s going to be here for a long time. Hopefully we’ll be a part of that, by producing new concepts.
Alien Xmas (©2020 Netflix)
Alien Xmas is available now on Netflix. For more on the work of Stephen and Chiodo Bros visit chiodobros.com